MILWAUKEE — Mayor Tom Barrett was hospitalized Sunday after a man attacked him with a metal pipe as the mayor tried to assist a grandmother screaming for help near the Wisconsin State Fair.
Barrett, 55, was in stable condition at a local hospital with a fractured hand and other head and hand wounds, officials said.
A suspect was arrested Sunday at a home, and police recovered the alleged weapon.
The mayor had gone to the fair outside Milwaukee on Saturday night with his sister, two daughters and a niece. As the group left and walked to Barrett’s car, they heard a woman screaming for someone to call 911, police said.
Police said the woman was a grandmother who was trying to protect her 1-year-old granddaughter from a 20-year-old man, an assault authorities characterized as a domestic dispute.
“The mayor stopped and said something (to the man) like, ‘Let’s all cool down here. I’m going to call 911,’ ” said the mayor’s spokesman, Patrick Curley. “He said it one or two times, according to him. When he took out his phone, that’s when the suspect attacked him.”
The man hit Barrett in the head and torso with a pipe.
Barrett apparently fought back, fracturing his hand when he punched the attacker.
“I think he hit the guy,” Curley said. “I don’t know where, but it was hard enough, whatever he hit, to fracture his hand.”
The attacker fled the area when he heard sirens. The woman and the baby were uninjured.
The mayor underwent successful surgery Sunday on his fractured right hand and also had cuts on his head and lip stitched up, Curley said. He likely will remain in the hospital through today, he said.
“We’re extremely proud of Tom’s selflessness and his courage,” John Barrett, the mayor’s brother, said as he fought back tears at a news conference.
Barrett was elected mayor in 2004 and re-elected last year with nearly 80 percent of the vote. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1992 to 2002.
